Thursday, April 14, 2016

From ‘Until my Freedom has Come. The New Intifada in Kashmir’ Edited by Sanjay Kak

Suvir Kaul

Kashmiris have seen too much suffering over the past two
decades (and before) not to see themselves as at the receiving end of the
policies of an imperial state. The security apparatus is too visible and
intrusive on a daily basis to be understood as anything other than a reminder
of an occupation force and a subject people. And there has been no justice
offered for even the most egregious acts of violence committed by the military,
the paramilitary, or the police. There have been spectacular instances of
murder, torture and rape, and no immediate moves to bring criminals to justice
……

….the highly intrusive security footprint to think about, I
had travelled in Punjab in the worst years of the Khalistan movement, and I
remember just how humiliating and fear-inducing it was to be stopped and
questioned over and over again, to have your car searched, and occasionally to
be patted down. This is how Kashmiris have lived for twenty years now. No one
goes anywhere, even in times of relative peace, without being aware of
surveillance and check-points. An entire generation – the young on the streets
now – have grown up with no other sense of the Indian state. India is the jawan
who slaps you because it has been a long day and you are less patient in the
checking-line than he would like. India is the officer who smiles sardonically
as you are pushed to the ground and kicked for good measure; India is the force
that tears you and your family from your home to stand around for hours as
entire neighbourhoods are cordoned off and searched. And this is low-level
business. There have been far harsher crimes committed by state agents, but no
one has been punished, and that fact alone rankles and will not die.

Sanjay Kak

For a people bruised and battered by fifteen years of an
armed struggle, every single mechanism by which they could find representation,
or hope to be heard, or access minimal justice, had been dismantled and put
away, Elections, the judicial process, the rule of law: all had been hollowed
out. In their place we had the draconian provisions of the Armed Forces Special
Powers Act (AFSPA), and the Public Safety Act (PSA). Despite the fact that an
elected legislature was in place, real power was widely regarded as lodged in
three specific sites: Badami Bagh, Srinagar’s cantonment, where the corps
headquarters of the Indian Army are located; Gupkar Road, where a slew of
Indian intelligence agencies are based; and Raj Bhawan, formerly the maharaja’s
palace, now the governor’s home. (Kashmiris don’t fail to make the obvious
connection that all three sites are implicated in a century of highly
oppressive rule by the Dogra maharajas.)

Aaliya Anjum and
Saiba Varma

Since 1989, civilian life in Indian-administered Kashmir has
been governed through the presence of more than half a million troops, making
the region the most heavily militarized zone in the world. This despite the
fact that last year, official government figures put the number of militants
operating in the Valley at less than 500.

Ravi Nessman

More than two decades of brutal warfare between largely
Muslim separatist insurgents and largely Hindu Indian troops in this Himalayan
region have left Kashmiris exhausted, traumatized and broken. The rate of
suicide, once unthinkable in this Islamic society, has gone up twenty-six-fold,
from 0.5 per 100,000 before the insurgency to 13 per 100,000 now ….Drug abuse
is epidemic. Depression, stress and mental illness are rampant …..

Gautam Navlakha

When post-colonial states deploy troops to bring a
rebellious people, formally their ‘own people’, to submission, and hand over
that area to the military, then in actual fact they act as an alien force. The
relationship that ensues between the military force and the people is akin to
that between a subject people and their imperial masters. The military force
seeks to restore the authority of the state on a reluctant people, however long
it takes to do so. ….The reason we do not perceive it as war is that it takes
place within the borders of the nation-state, where the deployment of the armed
forces of the union is somehow considered legitimate, even when it is engaged
in suppressing our ‘own’ people.

…..1 August 2006 …there were more than 6,67,000 security
forces in the state. This is an incredibly high concentration of troops for an
area whose total population is not more than ten million …one soldier for every
fourteen-fifteen people.

There cannot be any
dialogue inside an army camp

-Yirvun Kreel

Nitasha Kaul

IOK has never been an indisputable part of India …It is no
coincidence that Kashmir and the North-East were two of the least involved
regions during the nationalist freedom struggle which led to India’s
independence, and it is these regions which have remained least understood in
the mainstream nationalist imagination.